New York Times Best-seller, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz tells the captivating life story of Oscar, a sweet but embarrassingly awkward, overweight boy. Oscar Wao’s story is one that talks about life’s impending dooms, the kind that trace back generations and are rooted in superstition. Dominican-born but New Jersey raised, if there is at least one thing that believes in Oscar it’s the Fukú, a curse that all who are Dominican are familiar with in one form or another, and whose presence Oscar has felt since the end of his young “baller,” days-back when he had not only one girl but two. Oscar’s inability to decide between his two “girlfriends,” Maritza and Olga, is what ultimately led to him losing the interest of both girls and, he believes, is what led to him being such an undesirable geek from the age of seven and on. …show more content…
Ever since the end of their short-lived, “romance,” things have only been looking down for the former threesome. Despite being wildly beautiful and commanding the attention of men everywhere, Maritza’s love life was just a big ball of hurt; she just didn’t compare to other Dominican women in the sense that she let herself be slapped around by the men that she was dating instead of slapping them around herself-like Oscar’s sister, Lola, and his “Mami ” would’ve done. Throughout the years, Olga fared even worse than Maritza, gaining several pounds until she matched the weight of Oscar herself, the bad “no-love karma,” that hit Oscar left her so undesirable that, to paraphrase, not even her boobs were good enough to look at. Such was life, such was their lives...extraordinarily bad “no-love” lives is what they all lived and so with how bad love went for him, Oscar turned to other, geekier things for
The scene described on pages 143-152 of Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a horrific one, yet it is essential to the novel due to its power and its effective use of language. In the pages listed, there is are descriptions of La Inca praying for Belicia and the two Elvises beating Belicia to near death. La Inca is able to gather many people together to unite in prayer in hopes of saving Belicia. Even those who were not supportive of her decisions and those who considered her to be a whore.
It is not until later in the chapter that the audience is made aware that the narrator was Lola. This shift in voice is undoubtedly a choice made by Díaz to cause confusion amongst his audience. In doing so, Díaz makes the reader think about how Lola’s perspective could give insight on the true protagonist, Oscar. As the chapter continues, the audience begins to see Lola’s own development as a child and how it deeply contrasted Oscar’s growth. She, unlike Oscar, is often under the critique of her own mother as she grew up.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the reader follows the story of Oscar de Leon as told by his college roommate, Yunior. Although the novel is named after Oscar and depicts his life, the information given tells more about Yunior than Oscar. In many ways, however, Oscar serves as a foil to Yunior, showing the hardships of achieving masculinity in Dominican culture. While, to the public, Yunior is the typical masculine, sexually-driven posterchild of Dominican culture, so much of him is shaped by his relationship with Oscar. In some aspects, Oscar was able to mirror Yunior’s struggles, especially when it came to girls and masculinity, but he is also able to illuminate how hard Yunior struggled to fit in by being more true
The book being discussed in this essay is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The timeline in this novel was difficult to keep up with due to very frequent time jumps and different character’s perspectives. The entire story was underlined by a curse called “fuku.” Fuku was a curse believed to be brought over by Christopher Columbus and had ties to a Dominican Republic dictator named Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who was frequently mentioned during the story.
Has life ever been so horrible that you thought it was out of your control? Your life could start off wonderful, as you grow instead of life getting better everything just gets worse and worse. In The Brief LIfe of Oscar Wao, Diaz argues that the supernatural, specifically, the Dominican Republic, curse “Fuku” is present in individuals lives; he conveys this argument through Oscar and Beli’s encounters with the Mongoose. Beli and Oscar’s encounters with the Mongoose are examples of the presence of the supernatural, arguably "fuku," in their lives and the effect that fuku has on them. Beli is the first character to encounter the Mongoose; she sees it when she gets beat up for her affair with the Gangster, who is married to Trujillo’s sister.
During the 1930’s, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was the dictator of the Dominican Republic. Corrupt Trujillo ruled with an iron fist and maintained control by using the unscrupulous patronage system for appointing people to important offices, discretely murdering political opponents, and enforcing strict censorship laws. Many countries invested into the Dominican Republic without Knowing the horrors that the Regime was causing for the povern stricken people. Junot Diaz was raised in the Dominican Republic’s chaos and a sense of unity has been forced upon him for survival as a result.
Beli as a young girl wanted a change in her life. Beli as a kid pretty much had everything she needed but what she really wanted was change. She was tired of not having the ability to have her own bed, or not being able to the clothes she wanted. She wanted all of it to change, even in the novel “The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, It talk about how “she always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape” she wanted to escape from the life she called normal, she wanted to change. Just like Beli, Lola her daughter wanted a change in her life.
The groundbreaking novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores many different aspects of life. The story is told by narrator, Yunior, focusing on Oscar De Leon and his family’s Dominican experience during the Trujillo regime. Oscar isn’t the typical Dominican male and is isolated as a result of the gender roles that are so heavily relied on and seen in the Dominican culture. The idea and execution of gender roles has been around for many years. These roles are based on the values and beliefs about gender within groups or societies.
The character Yunior, being the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is all in good reason being he is the standing of true Dominican male. Yunior emulates the Dominican American stereotypes of masculinity. Stereotyped that a man must be dominate, powerful, and with a attractive physic, Dominicans are expected to come with a violent nature and through physical violence and verbal aggression, act on an increased sexual drive without that masculine persona and things Oscars has a hard time crossing into those steps of manhood. From jump, it seems like Oscar in relation to the title isn’t the outsider and portrayed to enhance an image of the narrator in the mind of the reader. Then through a break down argument it became clear
Past issues can affect the future by treating others badly. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, this character named Oscar has had a rough past and he doesn’t quite realize how he treats other because how horrible his past was. His mother Beli treated him badly as a kid, Oscar constantly got rejected by woman, and when he became a substitute teacher he got rejected by his students. Beli was a mother who didn’t take anything from anyone because that’s how she was raised; she was harsh to her kids Lola and Oscar, which changed Oscar for the worse. She expects a lot from her two children but she doesn’t show them because she doesn’t want to show them weakness, she’s a very harsh mother.
In Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the image of Beli and Lola losing their virginities show how both characters believed that they found “love” but the men they lost their virginities with just used them for their bodies and sex, they did not truly love them. When Lola describes her experience she mentions, “...that hurt like hell, but the whole time I just said, Oh yes...because that was what I imagined you were supposed to say while you were losing your ‘virginity’ to some boy you thought you loved” (Díaz 64). This conveys how even though she was in pain while she was having intercourse, she put that aside because she thought she had true love and that was all that mattered at the time.
Her sisters disappeared and she was left alone. No one in her father family wanted her because she was really darken and she was born bakini- underweight for a baby and ever sickly. ( Díaz,2008,pg 251-252). Even though many would believe that the fuku is the protagonist, it is clear that Oscar is the true representation of a protagonist because he is continuously judged because of his unexciting lifestyle and his lack in
The role that gendered expectations plays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao constructs detrimental limitations for males while reducing females to sexual beings. The prevalent Dominican males in the novel reinforce an absolute definition of masculinity characterized by dominance, attractiveness, manifestation of sexuality, and oppression of women. Such masculinity is constructed through every aspect that Rafael Trujillo, the ultimate Dominican male, embodies. Through the endorsement of expected Dominican hypermasculinity, females are overtly hypersexualized by means of objectification, while men are confined to fulfilling expected roles. In failing to embody Trujillo’s misogynistic, patriarchal ideal, males and females in the novel marginalize
Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418).
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz successfully links Dominican history during the reign of Trujillo directly to the characters' past, present, and future. Using narrative and literary elements, such as the symbol of Blank Page, Díaz argues that it is necessary for one to record history and understand it in order to become a more serene individual. The symbol of blank page emphasizes the effect of the blankness or emptiness of the past which creates a void of understanding in making correct decisions. He presents this theme by describing each character's point of view and struggles- in which many could have been avoided if they had known the mistakes of the hidden past. His use of narrative structure addresses each unique yet similar conflict of the intertwined past and present that had affected all three generations.